Hershey says its planning to spend more to promote its brands to better compete for candy buyers’ when Mars buys Wrigley.

I would say that I am the Darth Vader of the Chocolate Wars, but that would make you think I like Dark Chocolate. So I am the Lando Calrissian in the Chocolate Wars.

Keyboards need to be smarter, not prettier

Why isn’t there a keyboard that recognizes where my fingers are and adjusts according? No more “home row.” We had a typewriter in high school with blank keytops to improve touch typing. Why don’t we have that today? Just a bunch of keys that are stupid until they feel the warm of my touch. At that moment, the keys adjust to my finger placement.

How odd. His wife has MS, and I’m guessing they don’t want her to go into labor, so they picked July 23 as the child’s birthday. How odd. My birthday is on or around Thanksgiving Day. That’s pretty cool. I love Thanksgiving dinner, so I always get my favorite meal. When I was growing up, there usually was a big gathering for Thanksgiving/My Birthday which was fun.

Unless you’re Jesus, the worst time to have a birthday is within two weeks before Christmas and one week after. Duh.

Summertime would be a good time to have a birthday. If you wanted to have a party, nobody can say they can’t make it because of the snow.

Ben is a saunterer. I never saunter. I’m either stock still or rushing about.

I correctly guessed all three of my younger kids’ birthdays although only Matt was induced (but the decision to induce wasn’t made until the day he was born, when I’d already predicted the day). And all of them were born 1-2 weeks before their due dates. Moms know stuff.

When we adopted my son (2000) there was a fairly common (but maybe somewhat unknown?) practice of giving an internationally adopted child a “new” birth date to more suitably match his/her retarded physical/social/emotional development caused by years of institutionalization.

Sometimes a kid would end up (on paper) a whole year or 18 months YOUNGER than he/she actually was.

[More…] I’m not talking about choosing an approximate birth date when the true/real birth date is unknown (in the cases of ‘abandoned’ children where no known info exists) I’m talking about rebirth(dating) a child knowingly.

I don’t even know if it’s legal in the US to do this to any person (adopted or not) – but I know it has, and probably still does happen, in international adoptions, most likely on the international legal/adoption side of things (i.e. before the child ever reaches US immigration).

Isn’t there (or shouldn’t there be) something about falsifying a birth certificate that is not only ethically wrong, but downright illegal?

I always thought the practice was weird/wrong/uncalled for… and just kinda creepy. How can a parent “rebirth(day)” a child and completely dismiss months and months of his/her life as if they’d never existed?

It seems that giving a child a new birthday is almost like pretending the child is a completely different person – which only adds to negative adoptive parent stereotypes. It proves that the adoptive parents want to dismiss the child’s nature, culture and “original existence” and it will most definitely add to the confusion the adopted will deal with later in life.

While I understand the want of any child’s parent(s) to see their child among peers to whom he/she can relate to on similar levels, I feel the better alternative is to keep the child’s REAL birth date and follow the child’s lead when it comes to schooling, friendships and learning.

@Krissi: No kidding! See that’s what’s cool about this whole blogonia thing. I now know something I didn’t even have a clue about before. Thanks for weighing in. I think I’ll saunter over and read your post.